NWREL Receives Two

NSF Grants

The Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory has received its first-ever research grants from the National Science Foundation. Not one, but two, multiyear grants were awarded. Edith Gummer will investigate the effect of NWREL's mathematics problem-solving model in a five-year, $1.8 million study. Michael Coe received almost $413,000 for a two-year study of models of evaluation and research for educational technologies. Both grants emphasize the Laboratory's commitment to research that informs good educational practice.

Gummer's grant is one of only eight Interagency Education Research Initiative (IERI) awards this year. Her work will focus on the Laboratory's mathematics problem-solving model, which uses a scoring guide and a number of open-ended tasks with multiple solution pathways. "NWREL has used this with teachers in a number of different instances and there is an indication that it will increase student achievement," she says. "So, the issue is: Here's a model that's been designed and pilot tested but requires research to more systematically explore its effect."

For the study, Gummer and two co-investigators—Thomas Dick of Oregon State University and Karen Marongelle of Portland State University—will recruit Washington middle school teachers. During the first year, 10 teachers will be randomly assigned to a control group and 10 to a treatment group that will receive two weeks of professional development during the summer of 2005. They'll also receive a number of classroom follow-up observations and continuing professional development activities throughout the school year. Using a rotating design, the control group teachers are guaranteed treatment in the following years, with a total of 60 teachers to be served during the course of five years.

The researchers will collaborate with the teachers to define high-quality teaching and learning in mathematics problem solving and to identify good problem-solving tasks that are tied to state standards. They'll also work on classroom discourse and questioning strategies that help students embody the criteria by which they're evaluated. Then the team will go to classrooms and observe students as they work individually or in groups to solve the problems. "A big part of this grant is to look at what happens when classroom discourse is structured around the scoring guide and the criteria for evaluation: the students' understanding of the criteria is what's being supported," says Gummer. "We're really interested in how talking about the quality of the math problem solving changes what happens in the classroom and the way students interact with each other and with the teacher."

Coe's study is an extension of work he has been doing at NWREL with members of the Technology in Education Center. He will examine 60 different educational technology projects, half of which are funded by NSF and the other half by federal "E2T2" grants.

"The basic idea is to look for patterns in how people are using technology to improve education in the areas of math and science," says Coe. "We'd like to find out if there are ways to characterize these practices using clear models that will support good project design and management as well as good research and evaluation."

During each phase of the project, a panel of nationally recognized experts will provide advice. The members include Ray Barnhardt, University of Alaska Fairbanks; Chris Dede, Harvard University; Walter Heinecke, University of Virginia; Margaret Honey, Center for Children and Technology, Education Development Center, New York; and Saul Rockman, ROCKMAN ET AL, San Francisco.

Coe points out that often "the wrong questions" are asked when evaluating educational technology. He hopes his project will ultimately help people ask better questions and to know more clearly what needs to be measured and what kinds of statistical models should be used.

"The current focus for many education organizations is research that gets at issues of causation," he observes. "What works in schools to improve results for students, how does it work, and how do we know it works? Can we say unequivocally that a certain program or practice causes improvement in teaching and learning when used in a certain way? This project is about building better testable models of causation in the area of educational technology, specifically applied to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—which are the focus for the National Science Foundation."

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